Chronicle of the Conspiracy
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Saturday, April 10, 2004

NEW TIMES JOB "FEARS" -- NOT ENOUGH SEASONAL WORKERS
I wonder who's on vacation at the New York Times business section? Somehow some good news slipped in. How about the headline: "A Shortage of Seasonal Workers Is Feared." Perhaps heads won't roll, as at least they managed to frame a good jobs outlook in negative terms -- fear. And in today's paper edition, on the same front page of the business section, is a chart showing the spectacular recent performance of stock markets throughout the Middle East. Who knew? Who didn't?

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OKRENT CLARIFIES HIS DUTIES
I asked New York Times "public editor" Dan Okrent to comment on the email his associate Arthur Bovino sent to a reader, published here Thursday, seeming to abdicate any responsibility for the op-ed columnist page. Thanks to Dan for this terrific response:

My man Bovino sent out the wrong message from our store of semi-stock responses, and he feels horrible about it. I feel worse -- I'd like to insulate him from public opprobrium and take the hit for any misdeeds or bad policies myself.

I have not absented myself from oversight of what appears on the opinion pages. But I do feel I have made my position on columnist corrections clear in as public a fashion as I could -- in the pages of the newspaper, and in the column's continuing presence on the web. I'm also very confident that this debate can proceed without my constant involvement. The Times is a big paper, and I've got many other things to attend to.

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LIBERAL PREJUDICE AGAINST CONDI RICE
Gary Trudeau calls her "Brown Sugar" in this Doonesbury strip (thanks to Robert Musil for the link). And Maureen Dowd judges her 911 Commission testimony "character assassination" in a column published the night before Rice even testified.

Maybe after high-definition TV, they'll invent high-dudgeon TV, a product so realistic you can just lunge through the screen and shake the Bush officials when they say something maddening about 9/11 or Iraq, or when they engage in some egregious bit of character assassination. It would come in handy for Karen Hughes's Bush-nannying book tour and Condoleezza Rice's Clarke-riposting 9/11 commission testimony.

Sometimes I wish Condi didn't have so much class. I'd love to see her play the race card and blow these smug bigots away.

The session before the panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, produced long stretches of bureaucratic language, including the word "task" as a verb, with images of people with their "hair on fire," figuratively speaking, in alarm.

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SAY IT AIN'T SO, DAN OKRENT
A reader whose name I won't mention passed along a troubling email he got from
Arthur Bovino, assistant to New York Times "public editor" Dan
Okrent, in response to the reader's complaints about the
deceptively truncated quote from Wolf Blitzer in
Paul Krugman's
column last Friday. What the hell is Bovino talking about here? The reader's
question is about an op-ed columnist, but Bovino's response is about the
"editorial board" -- the folks who write the unsigned house editorials. And how
can Bovino possibly think he's being responsive by positioning Krugman's bitchy
reinforcement of his deception in Tuesday's
column as some kind of remedy?

Dear Mr. [omitted],

The positions taken by the editorial board of The Times are not within Mr.
Okrent's purview. I include a response from him below to this effect:

The positions taken by the editorial borad [sic] of The Times are not
within my purview nor should they be; the editorial board is entitled to its
views, and readers are free to agree or disagree with them.

That said, Mr. Krugman did append a statement regarding your concern at the
bottom of his column:

A Yawngate update: CNN called me to insist that despite what it first
said, the administration really, truly wasn't responsible for the network's
claim that David Letterman's embarrassing video of a Bush speech was a fake.
I still don't understand why the network didn't deny White House involvement
until it retracted the charge. But the main point of Friday's column was to
highlight the way CNN facilitated crude administration smears of Richard
Clarke.

As we know that the editors are concerned with reader response, I have
forwarded your comments regarding a possible correction to editorial page
editor Gail Collins.

Sincerely,
Arthur Bovino
Office of the Public Editor

Maybe Bovino just dashed this one off without having understand just about
anything about the matter at hand. Or maybe he understands it perfectly, and
he's saying that Okrent is washing
his hands of the whole issue of the truthfulness and accuracy of the Times
columnists, this after his
very
constructive column on the subject two weeks ago. Fine -- we can all agree that opinion qua opinion is inviolate. But
considering what this letter is supposed to be responding to, it seems
that to cite the "opinion" defense amounts to abdication on the accuracy issue.

The really scary part is if Bovino really means it when he offers that
Krugman's repetition of the lie supported by the doctored quote is positioned as
"regarding your concerns." An uncharitable reading would be that the "public
editor" is actually helping to cover up for columnists who won't correct
themselves, by pretending that they are.

I've asked Okrent for a comment. I hope he'll tell me that Bovino did not
respond appropriately here.

TOP TEN TIMES HEADLINES ON JOBS
Since Paul Krugman is so
interested in David Letterman, here, from the inexhaustible
Ace o' Spades, is the top ten best headlines from the New York
Times on the explosive growth in jobs last month:

10. New Trends in Economy Will Displace Many Workers; Hundreds of DNC
Staffers Likely to Lose Their Bulls--t, Daddy-Got-Me Jobs

9. Despite Improving Job Picture, Many Americans Report They Still Regularly
Suffer From "A Bad Case of the Mondays"

8. In Ohio, Heroes Confronted With Heartbreaking Choices: Returning Iraq War
Veterans Must Choose Between $65,000 Per Year Out of State or $55,000 Per Year
Closer to Home

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KRUGMAN HUMILIATED ON JOBS IN BARRON'SThanks to reader Stan Greer for pointing out an
outstanding Gene Epstein column in this weekend's Barron's.
It's a great summary of the tortured history of jobs statistics during this
economic recovery. The best part, however, is when this seasoned pro starts
taking apart Paul Krugman's amateurish and politicized attempts at
reading labor statistics.

These revelations of Epstein's clearly and incontrovertibly mean that
Krugman's March 12 column
was in error on two counts, and must be corrected.
I had already found a major error in that column -- but a much simpler one
(I am not the expert on labor statistics that Epstein is). And for my trouble I
got
a rude blow-off letter from Krugman's editor Gail Collins.

So then the only question is: exactly how will Krugman
try to smear Epstein? Three consecutive New York Times columns worth
of lies, as in
the case of poor Wolf Blitzer? Somehow I doubt it. In this fellow
Epstein, Krugman might have finally found an opponent who is willing to spend as
much ink as he is. And who is absolutely right.

If I may quote liberally (adding my own emphasis here are there)...

THE UNEMPLOYMENT-RATE DECLINE has been a bone in the throat of the doubters
ever since it fell to 5.7% in December. This figure, confirmed for the past
three months, is printing at either 5.6% or 5.7%, as it did in March -- down
from a range of 6.3% to 6.1% from June through September.

So what more do they want? Well, the anonymous reporter or reporters at the
Economist (the articles are never signed) declared Friday that the
unemployment rate for March was not to be believed because "many Americans,
despairing of ever finding a job, had dropped out of the work force altogether
in recent months and were therefore not counted as unemployed."

This false statement may have been inspired by Princeton economist and New
York Times columnist Paul Krugman. According to a recent column of his,
the fact that the "unemployment rate has fallen since last summer...[is]
entirely the result of people dropping out of the labor force" (March 12). But the labor force has increased since last summer, not
decreased. Krugman and his possible protégé at the Economist believe otherwise
because someone ignored a footnote.

This footnote I'm referring to appeared quite prominently below the officially
posted time series for the civilian labor force on the Bureau of Labor
Statistics Website. It reads, "Data affected by population changes in
population controls in January 2000, January 2003 and January 2004."

Now, anyone who has actually followed the employment numbers will know
immediately what the agency is trying to tell us. The recent figures are
no damn good, is what it's trying to tell us, and to find out why, you'll have
to dig a little.

Go on the Internet and click on
www.bls.gov/cps/cpspopsm.pdf -- a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) paper
posted March 3, 2004 -- to get the real numbers. By the third sentence of that
paper, it's clear that the decline you might find in the officially posted
data is a mirage. (The math's a bit too involved to go into here.)

The official numbers with the big footnote do show a decline in the labor
force since the summer of last year; but the real numbers show an increase. So
the fall in the unemployment wasn't caused by "people dropping out of the
labor force," because people didn't.

Is this a practical joke that might fool any professional? Well, the BLS pulls
these jokes all the time. Indeed, I don't know of any Wall Street
economist, good or bad, who's not aware of these glitches.

In that same column, Krugman falls for yet another BLS joke: "40
percent of the unemployed," he informs us, "have been out of work more than 15
weeks, a 20-year record."

Wrong again and for the same embarrassing reason. Someone was looking
at the officially-posted data. Yet in this case there was no footnote. If
there were, it would have said, in some way, that you can't compare the recent
figures for long-term unemployment with the same figures 20 years ago.

Or if you did, you had to adjust the recent figures downward. Based on an
analysis in a BLS paper of March '95 (at
www.bls.gov/ore/abstract/ec/ec950090.htm), Krugman's "40 percent" would
have to be lowered to 34.2 percent to make it comparable to the pre-1994 data.
And that would not even be a 10-year record, much less a 20-year one.

Why so? Well, in January '94, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of the
Census introduced a redesigned questionnaire for the Current Population Survey
(CPS). The CPS is the monthly door-to-door survey of about 60,000 households
from which all the "Household Data" are derived, including the data on
unemployment and unemployment duration.

The old version had been in use since 1967, and was clearly in need of an
overhaul. Questions were dropped; others added; and virtually all were
reworded.

The BLS and Census had already expected the new questionnaire to cause certain
tallies to change radically. Indeed, the revised version suddenly found many
fewer involuntary part-timers, "discouraged" workers, and unemployed "job
leavers."

It also found many more of the long-term unemployed. Just how the new
questions were suddenly bringing new answers is a fascinating story in itself.
In the case of the long-term unemployed, I personally believe the old
questions were better.

In sum, to make an historical comparison between now and 20 years ago, you
either had to adjust the old data upward, or the new data downward. If you
want to use these numbers to know what's happening in the real world, you have
to know these things.

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IS THE TIMES LEGALLY LIABLE FOR UNCORRECTED ERRORS?
Two readers have inquired why the New York Times (or other
newspapers) cannot be held legally liable for the accuracy of the facts it
publishes -- or at least for willfully not publishing corrections of known
errors. Of course there is a First Amendment defense that the Times would
surely mount. But it's not clear why the "commercial speech" of, say, mutual
fund companies can be regulated and litigated for liability while that of
newspapers cannot. If a reader detrimentally relies on something offered as a
fact in the Times -- which the Times subsequently learns is false,
but does not correct -- why shouldn't the reader be able to recover damages
arising from the Times' willful negligence? Or, alternately, if the
Times is to be shielded from such liability, then why not also shield mutual
fund companies?

Okay, blogosphere -- let me have it. I know this is a sinful thought that
must not be uttered.

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KRUGMAN SMEARS CNN AGAIN
Paul Krugman has adopted a new modus -- using his New
York Times column to engage in public bitch-outs of opponents who,
inevitably, end up having to let him have the last word from sheer fear and
exasperation. He started in on CNN's Wolf Blitzera week ago. Blitzer
responded, and Krugman used the response as the occasion for more bitching based
on
scandalously doctored quotes in
Friday's column. Now
he's after Blitzer again today, in the last paragraph of
his column
-- after he gets his licks in on the matter of the yawning boy at the Bush
speech:

A Yawngate update: CNN called me to insist that despite what it first said,
the administration really, truly wasn't responsible for the network's claim
that David Letterman's embarrassing video of a Bush speech was a fake. I still
don't understand why the network didn't deny White House involvement until it
retracted the charge. But the main point of Friday's column was to highlight
the way CNN facilitated crude administration smears of Richard Clarke.

The lesson: don't dare speak out against Krugman, because he'll smear you in
America's newspaper of record -- and you'll run out of ink before he does. Well,
go ahead Paul -- make my day, if you dare.

As to the example at hand, what possible difference does it make that "the
network didn't deny White House involvement until it retracted the charge"? Who
knows? But it sure makes it sound like Krugman's got pictures. And let's take
the opportunity to smear Blitzeragain, while we're at it (teach those
guys at CNN to complain!) -- Blitzer, whose quotes Krugman doctored to make it
seem as though he was passing on White House smears when in fact he was
asking another reporter about them -- who denied there were any!

But the best part of Krugman's column is his citation of the New York
Times Magazine'sstory last
Sunday about the supposed evisceration of the Clean Air Act. Krugman:
"As a devastating article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine documented, the
administration's rollback of the Clean Air Act has gone beyond the polluters'
wildest dreams."

"Up in Smoke: The Bush Administration, the Big Power Companies and the
Undoing of 30 Years of Clean Air Policy." So blares the cover of yesterday's
New York Times Magazine. Author Bruce Barcott isn't responsible for the
headline, but might not it have occurred to some editor somewhere at the Times
Magazine that there is nothing in the 13-page article that supports a claim of
"undoing" clean air policy? All pollution regulated by the Clean Air Act is
declining, has been declining for years, and continues to decline under George
W. Bush. That's not mentioned in the 13 pages, since it would more or less
spoil the entire premise of the story and the dramatic cover.

The gang at the Associated Press evidently hasn't been reading its own clips. As we pointed out yesterday, the AP's Tom Raum and Nedra Pickler let the Kerry camp spin them by declaring that Bush has "lost 3 million jobs" during his term in office. The actual number is either 2.2 million, if you're counting from January 2001, or 2.3 million if you start with the employment numbers from February 2001. Today, AP's Terence Hunt follows ignominiously in the tracks of his fellow wire servers, quoting Kerry stating that "This administration has one economic policy for America -- 3 million jobs lost and driving gas prices towards $3 a gallon," without contradicting the Massachsuetts senator's bogus number.

But what a difference a couple days makes. Based on Friday's report, the actual numbers are either 1.8 or 1.9 million.

My own fantasy was that Krugman was writing about the time
he
falsely accused me on national television of having "stalked" him
"personally." No? Maybe, then -- speaking of stalking -- it would be about when
Bill Clinton gave
instructions to his political operatives to smear Monica Lewinsky as
a stalker. No, that got nixed when Lewinsky produced a certain blue dress with
another kind of smear on it.

Come on. This is Paul Krugman we're talking about. America's most dangerous
liberal pundit. If he's talking about smears -- or about anything bad,
for that matter -- we can be sure that it's something he thinks the Bush
administration has done. In this case the, Bush administration's so-called
"smear" was -- as Krugman Truth Squad member
Jim Taranto
put it on his Wall Street Journal Best of the Web Today
blog -- "an accusation of airing made-up stuff on a comedy show."

Yes, it's all about a story that the New York Times didn't deem
important enough to bother to waste ink on, other than Krugman's ink -- the
matter of the yawning boy standing behind President Bush at a Florida
speech, caught on video and shown last week as a gag on David Letterman's
"Late Show." Why would Krugman even bother to mention such a thing?
Robert Musil theorizes on his Man Without Qualities blog that
Krugman "appears to have been competing with Maureen Dowd in some contest to
posit the most bizarre parallels between some popular culture ephemera and a
national political development." If that's the case, then Krugman wins
with this one.

The so-called "smear" is that CNN ran the Letterman clip last Tuesday
during its morning news show, after which host Daryn Kagan said "We're
being told by the White House that the kid, as funny as he was, was edited into
that video, which would explain why the people around him weren't really
reacting." Later, CNN reran the tape during another show, and anchor Kyra
Phillips said, "We're told that the kid was there at that event, but not
necessarily standing behind the president." Late in the afternoon CNN called
Letterman's office to say it was all a mistake. Letterman said on his Tuesday
show, "CNN has just phoned and ... the anchorwoman misspoke. They never got a
comment from the White House. It was a CNN mistake."

But that's not good enough for Krugman. Krugman will cite the AP as an
authority when its views agree with his, as he did in
his Tuesday column last
week, stating that "an Associated Press news analysis noted that...personal
attacks were 'standard operating procedure' for this administration." But in
this case, Krugman writes, "here's the really interesting part: CNN...told Mr.
Letterman that Ms. Kagan 'misspoke,' that the White House was not the source of
the false claim. (So who was? And if the claim didn't come from the White House,
why did CNN run with it without checking?)"

"Fact checking"? Krugman -- he of the infinitude of unchecked unfacts so
lovingly documented for him ex post in these web pages, he who writes for
a newspaper
that admits it does no fact-checking itself -- must be joking. This isn't
about fact checking. It's about something so alien to Krugman that he didn't
recognize it when it was right in front of his face: this was a correction.
That's right: CNN had the guts to do what Krugman and the rest of the Times
columnists can scarcely bear to imagine -- admit a mistake in public, and
apologize for it.

Unless, of course, Krugman knows something about the yawning boy incident
that the rest of us don't know. As he would say, "here's the really interesting
part" -- my own digital frame-by-frame forensic analysis of the video reveals a
man standing behind the boy, pulling a string attached to the back of the boy's
neck.

Of course, we're being told by the New York Times that the man, as
funny as he is, was edited into that picture. So on to more serious matters.

In the same Friday column Krugman takes another shot at CNN, in this case
following up on a shot he took at the network in his previous Tuesday column.
This time it's a serious accusation. As Krugman Truth Squad member
Matthew Hoy puts it, "Krugman claims that the Bush administration
somehow 'got' to CNN...a New York Times columnist has called several of
the network's journalists liars." But as you'll see, it's Krugman who is lying,
and who is willing to shamelessly distort quotations to do it.

On Tuesday Krugman wrote,

"...other journalists apparently remain ready to be used. On CNN, Wolf
Blitzer told his viewers that unnamed officials were saying that Mr. Clarke
"wants to make a few bucks, and that [in] his own personal life, they're also
suggesting that there are some weird aspects in his life as well."

Last Wednesday, while I was debriefing our senior White House
correspondent, John King, I asked him if White House officials were suggesting
there were some weird aspects to Richard Clarke's life...I was not referring
to anything charged by so-called unnamed White House officials as alleged
today by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. I was simply seeking to flesh
out what Bush National Security Council spokesman Jim Wilkinson had said on
this program two days earlier."

Then in Friday's column, Krugman replied to Blitzer,

"...here's a fuller quote, just to remove any ambiguity: 'What
administration officials have been saying since the weekend, basically, that
Richard Clarke from their vantage point was a disgruntled former government
official, angry because he didn't get a certain promotion. He's got a hot new
book out now that he wants to promote. He wants to make a few bucks, and that
his own personal life, they're also suggesting there are some weird aspects in
his life.'

"Stung by my column, Mr. Blitzer sought to justify his words, saying that
his statement was actually a question."

First, note that at no point here does Krugman assert that anything about Clarke's personal life has actually been made public as the result of anything Blitzer might have been referring to. If anything, he should be congratulating Blitzer on not passing on smears from the administration, rather than excoriating him for having been "used."

Second, it's a stunning bit of hypocrisy for Krugman to offer the "fuller quote, just
to remove any ambiguity." Tom Maguire on the Just One Minute blog
points out that his "fuller quote" left out the final sentence of what
Krugman falsely characterized as Blitzer's "statement" -- a sentence that makes
it perfectly clear that Blitzer was indeed asking a
question of CNN White House correspondent John King:

"Is that the sense that you're getting, speaking to a wide range of
officials?"

It was a question. Not a statement, as Krugman claims. And don't kid
yourself that Krugman didn't know the whole context. He wouldn't have even had
to go to the transcript of Blitzer's March 24 show to get the whole quote: it
was
on the site of the ultra-liberal blogger who calls himself "Atrios,"
which Krugman has
said that he reads.

"None of the senior officials I have spoken to here talked about Mr.
Clarke's personal life in any way."

The New York Times'
"Guidelines on Integrity" state that quotes must assure that "the intent of
the subject has been preserved." But I have not the slightest hope that this
egregious distortion of Blitzer's intent will ever be acknowledged or corrected,
even under the
new columnist corrections policy announced two weeks ago by editorial
page editor Gail Collins.

No, Krugman will continue to smear without fear the Bush administration, CNN,
and whomever else he wishes -- all the while claiming that it is they who are
doing the smearing.

LET'S HEAR IT FOR INDEPENDENT THOUGHT
I was invited by Right Wing News to submit a list of people I'd want to invite to a dinner party. 46 bloggers responded, and I'm delighted to say that not a single one of the people I named made the list of most-mentioned by the respondents.

WHICH NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST ARE YOU?
Take this simple online quiz, and find out. It says I'm David Brooks. It told Bruce Bartlett he's Paul Krugman. Bartlett and Krugman are equally alarmed about that.

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THE OKRENT LETTERS
Here's a disappointing collection of letters to New York Times
"public editor" Dan Okrent following up on
his piece
last week on the paper's columnist corrections policy. Dowd is
mentioned once. Krugman not at all. It's all about William Safire,
simply because of all the columnists, Safire had the courage and integrity to
let himself be quoted by Okrent last week, making this rather strong statement:
"An opinion may be wrongheaded...but it is never wrong. A belief or a
conviction, no matter how illogical, crackbrained or infuriating, is an idea
subject to vigorous dispute but is not an assertion subject to editorial or
legal correction." I have no doubt that Krugman blew Okrent off. So he gets a
bye today. So in today's edition of the newspaper of record, for anyone coming
cold to this topic, it would appear that his whole flap is about the inaccuracy
of William Safire. Great.

One bright note (sort of). Our friend Bruce Bartletthas a
thoughtful letter printed here. Bartlett states that he doesn't think columnists
ought to have to make trivial corrections, only ones relevant to the burden of
their argument. He concludes, saying "Of course, I also assume that people do
not expect me to be the final authority on every fact I cite, as may be the case
with Times columnists." This is a point that Okrent has never been willing to
acknowledge in his conversations with me. He is unmoved by the reality that the
Times is (mis)perceived as the "newspaper of record," and as such it
carries a special duty to be accurate -- even within its opinion pages.